Lucida

Lucida is a family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Created in the late 1980s, the Lucida family was intended to maximize legibility in both on-screen and printed text. The family includes multiple subfamilies, spanning sans-serif, serif, and monospaced faces, such as Lucida Sans, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Serif, Lucida Bright, as well as monospaced variants like Lucida Sans Typewriter and Lucida Console.

Design features include humanist letterforms, large x-height, open apertures, and generous stroke width variations that aid legibility at small sizes and on low-resolution displays. The aim was to provide faces that render clearly across different media and languages, with careful attention to optical spacing and punctuation.

History and distribution: The fonts were released by the Lucida Type Foundry and became widely used in the 1990s and early 2000s. Apple licensed Lucida Grande for the system user interface in macOS, and Microsoft incorporated Lucida Sans Unicode and Lucida Console into Windows, expanding its reach for multilingual interfaces and programming. The family was distributed across major computing platforms, contributing to its prominence in both interface design and document typography.

Impact and usage: The Lucida family is recognized for balancing classic serif and modern sans forms, and for its emphasis on on-screen readability. It has influenced later UI fonts and continues to be used in digital interfaces and print where legibility is prioritized. Lucida remains a notable example of type design aimed at clarity and versatility across sizes and contexts.